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Weekend Butler: The spice of the summer, the music of the summer, and a conversation you’ll never forget
Published: Jul 15, 2021
Category:
Weekend
THE SPICE OF SUMMER: Lao Gan Ma Chili Crisp Sauce With Roasted Chili Pepper Flakes
I thought a jar would last all summer. In two weeks, I’ve used half of it. It is true: you can use it on everything. You can add it to pasta sauce. Puts kick in mayonnaise. The chili oil is spicy, sweet, crispy (and no joke – it maintains its crispy texture!), savory, and well balanced. And there’s a remarkable “how it happened” story. For the tale and the sauce, click here.
IN HEAVY ROTATION: Víkingur Ólafsson
These weeks are unsettled. (Like: will democracy survive?) More and more, I’m listening to Víkingur Ólafsson playing the piano works of Philip Glass. This reader review on Amazon will suggest the devotion he generates: “My 10-day-old newborn is sleeping in my arms, Vikingur Olafsson’s interpretation of Philip Glass’ ‘Opening’ is playing in my headphones, and for all of seven minutes and forty-four seconds the world is standing still but for the music and the colors of autumn at the window and the comforting warmth in my lap and my flowing tears.” For more about the pianist and the Amazon links, click here.
KREMLIN LEAK APPEARS TO CONFIRM EXISTENCE OF TRUMP ‘KOMPROMAT’
The headline of a Guardian scoop — “Kremlin papers appear to show Putin’s plot to put Trump in White House” — goes far to confirm what so many Americans will never believe.
Vladimir Putin personally authorised a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council, according to what are assessed to be leaked Kremlin documents.
The key meeting took place on 22 January 2016, the papers suggest, with the Russian president, his spy chiefs and senior ministers all present There is a brief psychological assessment of Trump, who is described as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex.”
There is also apparent confirmation that the Kremlin possesses ‘kompromat,’ or potentially compromising material, on the future president, collected – the document says – from Trump’s earlier “non-official visits to Russian Federation territory
This comes as no surprise to you — on January 26, I posted this about Craig Ungar’s book:
“American Kompromat: How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power, and Treachery” is the follow-up to his 2018 bestseller, “House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia.” As the title of the new book suggests — “Kompromat” is Russian for “compromising information”— Trump is nothing less than a Russian “asset.” Not officially, of course. But from the beginning of his real estate career, he eagerly did business with the Russians, most of them shady and connected to the KGB. This relationship started small, with television sets for the Hyatt Hotel. An American immigration reform allowed hundreds of thousands of Russian Jews to immigrate to the United States. Lo and behold, 1,300 Trump condos were sold in “secretive, all-cash transactions that enabled buyers to avoid legal scrutiny by shielding their finances and identities.” And then, because Trump needed money and liked sex, we meet a grotty bunch, including, of course, Jeffrey Epstein. I knew a lot of this story, and it wasn’t hard to figure out why Trump was so fond of Putin, but it’s still mind-blowing to read how the President put his needs above his country’s. [To buy the book of “American Kompromat” from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
IF I READ A MORE EYE-OPENING, MORE EMOTIONALLY AND INTELLECTUALLY POWERFUL PIECE THIS YEAR, I’LL BE SURPRISED
Sy Montgomery is a naturalist and the author of dozens of books on animals. In 2015 she published “The Soul of an Octopus.” After reading her conversation with Ezra Klein in the Times, I bought it. You may want to do the same. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.
Some of the highlights:
You can tell that octopi like some people and dislike others, because the ones that they dislike they either try to get away from them, or sometimes, they will just blast them in the face with freezing cold saltwater before they jet away. They go towards the people that they enjoy…. We love to learn new things. And octopuses, they share that curiosity with us. And I think that is why we can be friends with an octopus.
Their intelligence may have been sculpted by different forces, they need their intelligence just as much as we need ours. And to pretend that they don’t have intelligence, or that they don’t have emotions, is to miss the very essence of a creature. And it’s true. Of course, we can project our own desires onto others. Have you ever asked somebody out who didn’t want to date you, or if you bought someone a Christmas gift that they didn’t like, you made a mistake.
You were projecting onto them something that you may have wanted yourself. And we do this with other animals. But I think the greater mistake is to assume that there’s nothing in those animals’ minds, that they don’t have thoughts or feelings. And it’s a huge mistake to think that they don’t love their lives like we love ours… It’s the biggest mistake we are making in the world. And we’re not just making it in underestimating animals, but we underestimate fellow human beings as well.
And this, which I find breathtaking and humbling and consoling as I watch the drama playing out in Washington and Texas and….
I had known Octavia since she first arrived at the aquarium. And we’d been very good friends. We had played with all kinds of things together. She had shown me that she had a sense of humor. She was just such a fun, sweet, smart octopus. But I’m going to skip ahead to when she laid eggs. Now unlike us, octopuses lay eggs toward the end of their lives and they only do it once.
And a giant Pacific octopus, once she lays her eggs, she never again leaves her lair. So when she laid her eggs, it was bittersweet, because I knew that she wasn’t going to leave her lair to come up and play with me anymore. She wasn’t ever again going to look up through the water at my face and come to play with me. But I got to watch her tend to her eggs, which was a wonderful thing to see.
And this was through instinct, I am sure, because she never could have watched anybody do this. She would clean them, she would fluff them, she would care for them. Well, giant Pacific octopuses only live between three and five years. She was on those eggs six months, seven months, eight months, nine months. And nine months is a huge portion of an octopus’s life. During those nine months, she had not looked up at the water at my face for what would be the equivalent in human years, for decades.
Well finally, one day, I came in and I could see through the glass in front of the display case that she had an eye infection. Her eye was all swollen. And I told Bill Murphy, who was the keeper and the head of cold marine, about this problem. She was just falling apart, as we all do with old age. And he felt that she should be taken off display, and that it would be better for her to be in a quiet, dark room — more hidden, the way a wild octopus would at the end of her days.
But then he had the problem of getting her out of that tank. So he asked one of the volunteers if he could urge her to get into a bucket so she could be moved. Well, even though she was old and sick and dying, she was still a giant Pacific octopus. And she wasn’t going to move. She didn’t want to. And she would not let go of the rock. She would not get into the bucket.
Finally, what Bill did was he took his ungloved hand and put it in the tank, into her lair. And she touched him and tasted him. And she clearly remembered Bill, because at his touch, she let go. And he was able to urge her into the bucket. And then he moved her behind the scenes to this quieter, darker place. And a few days later, I came in to see her again. And I knew this was going to be goodbye, because she was dying.
And I wondered, you know, was she going to remember me? I did not come in every day. I came in once a week. I spent a lot of time with her when I went in. And Bill couldn’t afford to spend that kind of time with her, but he fed her every day. Well, I opened the top of that barrel and saw her lying at the bottom. And she looked up. And a great effort — she rose from the bottom of the tank and I offered her a fish.
She hadn’t had anything to eat in a long time. And she just took the fish and dropped it. And she didn’t want the fish. She just wanted to touch and taste me and look into my face. And that’s what we did for some many minutes that felt like a long time. And then she dropped back down to the bottom of the barrel. She remembered me, even though we hadn’t interacted in that way for the human equivalent of decades.
And she not only remembered me, but she cared enough about me to make that huge effort and come to touch and taste me one last time.
